Nothing wrong with forced advancement as long as it's slow. If we had people happily writing Perl 5.005 code (or worse, imagine Perl 4), we would have people trying to keep up with the language and seek out new features. Stagnation = death. I don't want Perl to be like awk. No one does.

Also, more On-Topic: This topic isn't remotely about our being considered harmful, it's about your sysadmin being considered harmful. Our is not as good as my due to the principle of "smaller scope" is better, and I write code all day without it -- but I note a recent trend to tack "considered harmful" onto the end of meditations to appear like a certain famous computer science guy, and that's just silly.